In recent years, many Internet users
have become aware that when domain names expire (after their original registrants
forget, fail, or otherwise decline to renew them), the domain names may be reregistered
by others. This feature of the management of the domain name system might be
thought to be desirable since it allows and facilitates a turnover of names
from those uninterested in using them to those who in fact do seek to put them
to active use. But recent experience shows that this structure also allows domains
to be renewed by firms who do not seem to seek to use the domains to offer original
content but rather seem to hope to profit from the prior promotional works of
others.

In particular, such firms often offer
pornographic or sexually-explicit images, advertising, or links or redirects
to other commercial sites. The apparent expectation of such firms is that at
least some users will request the web pages previously (before domain expiration)
hosting other content; any such users will instead be shown this new content,
likely creating profits for the firms that reregistered the expired domain names.

In recent research, I have documented
several thousand domains reregistered by one particular firm -- many domain
names that all redirect users to one particular web page displaying sexually
explicit images. While this research is by no means exhaustive -- other firms
are likely conducting similar registration practices, and still others make
numerous registrations and reregistrations that no doubt differ in various ways
-- a review of these specific registrations as well as their general characteristics
may be helpful in understanding the behavior at issue.

A Case Study:
"Tina's Webcam" Reregistrations by Domainstrategy.com

DNS zone files, default HTTP response
pages, and WHOIS contact information reflect that a firm called DomainStrategy
(http://www.domainstrategy.com/)
operates some 4000+ domain names that all redirect to a page called "Tina's
Free Live Webcam" (henceforth, "Tina") available at http://www.tinawebcam.com/
(warning: sexually-explicit content).

The domain names that redirect to
Tina are a mixture of three types of character strings. A portion of the domains
use generic combinations of numbers and letters without any obvious meaning
(a5s.org, 8ca.net, 5218.net). Other domains use words or combinations of words
that clearly suggest the presence of sexually-explicit content (a1porno.com,
a1asians.com, free-black-gay-sex.com). Some of these strings may accurately
describe the content available from Tina's site; however, at least from the
front page of the Tina site, it is uncertain that many or even most of these
strings in fact correctly describe the content available after registration.
Finally, many of the domains have character strings that suggest the presence
of content quite different from the content ultimately presented after a redirect
to the Tina site. For example, americanmuseumofnaturalhistory.com, aplusparents.com, babysitters.com, bicyclebills.com, childrens-media.org, childrenwithaids.org, familyconnection.net, freecipro.com, fraudindex.com,
harvardfootball.org, jackson-family.com, minnesotamom.com, napa-auto-parts.com, oceanicmuseum.com, ourchildstoys.com, ridgefieldhighschool.com, and savannah-bbb.org each suggest the availability
of a certain kind of content other than sexually-explicit images.

The Tina site seems to be operated
by the same DomainStrategy firm that registered the 4000+ domain names referring
to it; Tina and the referring sites share similar WHOIS contact information.

Update: As
of August 16, Tina's Webcam seems to have been renamed "Wanda's Webcam."
The web content previously available at the Tina site is now available under
Wanda's name, including the same images of the same woman. The change in name
has made this site's analysis somewhat harder to find -- newcomers to DomainStrategy
registrations will likely search for "Wanda's Webcam" rather than
Tina's -- which leads the author to suggest that DomainStrategy may have renamed
the site in order to confuse Internet users and search engines. Update: As of February 2003, the site seems to have changed names again, this time to "Sophy's Free Live Cam."

"Tina's
Webcam": Specific Testing Results

In recent testing and archiving,
I have prepared a listing of a total of 4525 distinct domains that all redirect
to the page entitled "Tina's Free Live Webcam."

For each domain, I have attempted
to obtain a variety of information including:

Current title of default web page

Date of domain registration by
current registrant, when available from registrar

Prior page title, when available
from archive.org (as of approximately January 1, 2000)

Prior META DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS
tags, when available from archive.org (as of approximately January 1, 2000)

Current Yahoo category, when available
from Yahoo (as of April 15, 2002)

Other pages referencing or linking
to domain, when available from Google (with counts as of April 15, 2002)

The number of times the page was accessed by Alexa users between December 2001 and May 2002, with rank data when available

Access to page archives, when
available from archive.org

Due to the large size of the listing
of results (>4MB total), it is available in sections by letter
of domain name:

Update: The DomainStrategy.com
page provides a link to public, freely-available statistics tabulated by extremetracking.com
of usage of the DomainStrategy.com site. These statistics report that, since
DomainStrategy reconfigured its domains to point to its DomainStrategy page
rather than Tina's Webcam, it has received some 25,000+ visitors per day at
that page -- no doubt partly inflated by the publication and discussion of this
report, but nonetheless a large volume of traffic. A Yahoo-Korea site provided
a link that yielded some 70,000 hits between November 14, 2001 and April 25,
2002. Especially popular DomainStrategy-registered domains include domains that
would at first glance seem to be related to certain movies, restaurants, stores,
humor sites, and at least one police department. See snapshots of overview
of usage, top
domains, usage
by day, top
users, and specific
users (as they stood on April 25, 2002).

Update: As of May 10, sexually-explicit "Tina's Webcam" content has returned to most of the domains
linked above. New data also suggests that DomainStrategy continues to reregister additional domains and ordinarily displays Tina content on them.

"Tina's
Webcam": Summary Statistics

Of the 4525 distinct domains redirecting
to Tina, prior titles (different from current titles) were retrievable for 2991
domains, reflecting that these 2991 domains previously hosted different content
than is currently the case.

Archive.org archives are available
for 4156 of the domains, allowing the viewing of as many as 993 distinct versions
of each domain.

According to current testing in Google,
2066 domains are mentioned in one or more web pages (as via a link or a textual
reference to the domain name).

Yahoo continues to classify 210 of
the domains into its hierarchical directory categories. In a casual inspection,
none of these categories seems to properly characterize the content available
from the "Tina's Webcam" site.

Many of the Tina domains are or have
previously been very popular. Between December 2001 and May 2002, users of the
Alexa toolbar software accessed the most
popular of the domains now registered to Tina some 3.8 million times. 68 distinct
Tina domains were accessed more than 100,000 times during this period, 102 more
than 50,000 times, 281 more than 10,000 times, and 725 more than 1,000 times.

Possible
Conclusions

While the data linked above is but
a single case study of what seems to be a more widespread phenomenon, it is
nonetheless possible to draw certain conclusions on the basis of work completed
to date. Possible conclusions include the following:

The large number of domain registrations
by a single firm confirms experience that certain entities tend to register
large numbers of domain names.

Many domains offer web content
quite different from what their domain names might be taken to suggest.

Certain of the domain names that
now offer sexually-explicit content were previously registered by other registrants.
The domains seem to have come to host sexually-explicit content subsequent
to failure of a prior registrant to renew the domain name with an accredited
registrar.

Links and other online references
continue to point to domain names even many months after those domains have
come to host content inconsistent with the suggestion of the linking or referencing
pages. This phenomenon holds both for relatively small linking entities (i.e.
ordinary web pages) as well as large firms (such as Yahoo).

The domains that come to offer
sexually-explicit content are not "forgotten" or "unimportant."
Indeed, many of these domains receive hundreds of thousands or even millions
of accesses per year.

Future Work,
Discussion, and Policy Implications

It would be desirable to better understand
the scope of the renewal behavior practiced by DomainStrategy -- in particular,
to determine what other firms (if any) follow similar practices. My future work
will seek to document other instances of similar behavior -- and ultimately,
via an exhaustive or representative study of the namespace, to speak to its
scope. For the moment, my research technology requires an initial "seed"
domain as an example of such registrations; automated systems subsequently find
other examples of domains registered by the same firm, but a human must provide
a single example domain registered by each firm. To that end, I welcome and
appreciate the submission of examples of such domains.

While a full policy analysis is beyond
the scope of the current project, available data provides some guidance to those
who are concerned by the prospect of unexpected changes in domain registration,
particularly when such changes entail significant changes in the type of content
available at a particular web address. In particular, this data seems to support
the claim that changes in domain registration are widespread; there are at least
many thousands of examples of such behavior, and these thousands were obtained
in only several days of automated search. Further testing will likely produce
tens or hundreds of thousands of similar domains transferred to new registrants
via a similar process.

To the extent that reregistrations
by new registrants are thought to be problematic, the concern likely results
from at least three factors. First, as a result of such reregistration, the
initial registrant loses the use of the domain name at issue; the loss of the
domain presents a setback to the initial registrant's prior efforts to build
a business, identity, or brand around the domain name. Second, should the subsequent
registrant use the domain to provide content that the initial registrant's customers
or associates consider offensive, illegal, or otherwise undesirable, the initial
registrant risks some tarnishment of his reputation from the undesirable content
offered at his prior domain. Third, there may be privacy implications, as when
sensitive materials are sent to email addresses at domains operated by a new
registrant.

It is important to note that the
second cause for concern results not only from users typing in outdated web
addresses from memory (or from fixed sources such as business cards, letterhead,
or advertisements). Instead, current testing reflects that search engines and
other pages may continue to offer outdated links and descriptions -- references
that fail to properly represent the latest content available at a given web
address. Rapid updates of search engines is difficult given the size of the
Internet and its speed of change, but search engines might attempt to improve
accuracy here via some partnership with DNS registries so as to receive faster
notification of changes of domain registration. (Such information could be offered
freely to the interested public in some automatically-generated form, just as
current zone files are offered
by Verisign.) Alternatively, search engines could improve and better publicize
their "report an error" features, and directories like Yahoo could
add a specific form and prioritized processing procedure for reporting and correcting
the total misclassification of a web site. Via these methods, search engines
might improve their accuracy in properly describing and referencing the content
at given web addresses.

While these problems are difficult
to resolve within the framework of domains registered for use for some number
of years -- rather than "owned" as real property may be owned -- several
policies may help to mitigate the problem.

Increased consumer education would
help users of the Internet understand the possibility that unexpected content
may result when domains transition between registrants. ISPs (especially those
dealing directly with end-user consumers), ICANN, and the Internic FAQ might
attempt to be helpful in this regard.

Education of domain registrants
would help consumers of domain registration services better understand the
importance of promptly paying renewal fees. Such education might take place
at the time of domain registration and renewal, as well as via FAQs posted
on registrar web sites. To the extent that registrants failt to renew domains
names due to difficulty differentiating between legitimate invoices from a
registrant's actual registrar versus solicitations from those soliciting new
business, the registration process would benefit from reduction in the rate
of such solicitations as well as from improvements to the labeling of such
solicitations.

The structure of the domain name
system could be put to use in reminding registrants of the need to renew and
in giving them a final opportunity to do so without risking forfeiture of
expiring domains. As Richard Lau suggests,
such notification might take place via a temporary removal of an expiring
domain from name servers; after the domain has expired but before it is made
available to others, the domain might be replaced with a page reporting that
"your domain is past due, and you must renew it by x to avoid forfeiting
it." This error page would quickly cause interested registrants to pay
renewal fees, even while maintaining for some brief additional period the
current registrant's exclusive right to renew.

In addition to the public registrant
contact information made available via WHOIS, registrars could offer registrants
the opportunity to provide a "secret" "emergency-use-only"
email address to be used only for final notification just before final deactivation
of a domain after failure to renew on time. By setting this address to some
(tentatively) "permanent" address -- perhaps an address of a more
knowledgeable or experienced colleague or friend -- a registrant could add
an additional check before domain expiration. Since this address would not
be included in public WHOIS records, registrants would have no incentive to
provide an invalid address. (This suggestion was first offered by Richard
Lau.)

In evaluating appropriate policies
for domain expiration and transfer, it may in some instances be helpful to consider
real-world analogies. For example, disconnecting a consumer's home electricity
or water supply requires an extended period and complex procedure specifically
designed to give the consumer the benefit of the doubt at every turn; evicting
a tenant from a rental property follows a similar approach. While such procedures
may be considered somewhat excessive in the context of domain renewal, the underlying
principles of deliberateness and conservatism may prove helpful in assuring
the predictability of the name space.

In related
research, I have documented more than two thousand additional reregistered
domains with intentionally-invalid WHOIS data entered by their single registrant.

Motivation

The purpose of this work is primarily
academic -- to document the activity at issue for the benefit of those who seek
to make policy decisions on related matters. For example, ICANN
has convened a Redemption
Grace Period Steering Group to investigate policies ICANN might encourage
that would, perhaps among other benefits, address some portion of the consumer
confusion and other difficulties that may reduce the problems discussed here.

This page is made available to inform
discussion about the registration of Internet domain names. The data contained
here is not intended for use for other purposes, and it should not be used for
other purposes without first contacting the author.

Background information about this
topic is available from articles such as the following:

In order to confirm the results of
my testing and to attempt to obtain certain other information, I attempted to
reach the contacts listed in certain of the WHOIS records of domains referring
to Tina's Webcam. I have to date received no reply. Comments from Tina's staff
remain welcome, as are comments from others interested; with the permission
of the author, comments may be posted or linked from this page as appropriate.